Prayer Focus: March 2012

And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?

I tell you, he will see that ‘they’ get justice, and quickly.

Luke 18:7

The results of injustice often end in conflict where enemies stare at each other with hatred, threat and a desire to get even. Our world is not without battle fronts where war rages in armed conflict.

The primary victims of todays’ wars are civilian women and their children, not soldiers.

Rape has been widely used as a weapon of war. Women have been deliberately infected with HIV/AIDS or raped pregnant. They have been used to undermine, disgrace and threaten the perceived enemy.

How do we as the church arm ourselves against the tragedy of war?

‘To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world’.

Karl Barth

How do we as the church arm ourselves against the tragedy of war?

‘Again I looked and saw all the oppression that was taking place under the sun: I saw the tears of the oppressed – and they have no comforter, power was on the side of their oppressors – and they have no comforter’.

Ecclesiastes 4:1

What about war makes us angry?

The Salvation Army International Social Justice Commission’s policy Intern Casey O’Brien recently completed her Master’s Degree in ‘Policing, Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism’. For Casey, the subject of war went beyond enemy lines. She looked at the cost to those soldiers who die on battlefields, or return home with their own personal peace destroyed and challenged the social acceptance of this fact. To be protected from the horrors of war is to learn from past experiences of nations who take up arms to settle disputes.

How does God respond to conflict?

God sent his son to be the Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:6

That the Kingdom of God would seek peace and protect the most vulnerable
• That peacemakers would come from the Christian church as diplomats in global and civil disputes

That the church be equipped with counseling to embrace the trauma of soldiers and victims

That the church would live above political propaganda in judging others to be enemies without prejudice.

Study one hot spot of war and pray into this region

Liberator God, we cry out to you from the cramped and silent spaces of war, from the groaning and weeping places of sackcloth and ashes, aching over the structures of power and privilege that persist in our world, seeking repentance for our complicity in perpetuating such structures. We loudly lament and expose the injustice of violence that must be named if it is to be challenged and must be turned to dust and ashes out of which may spring new life and hope for your world.